To create your initial project, you just have to describe the public structures of the data to expose through the API. API Platform will take care of exposing the web API and bootstrapping the clients to consume it: get started with API Platform.

Version 2.4 introduces a lot of very interesting new features. Here is the curated list:

Read and write support for MongoDB, the reference document database, including a lot of useful filters

Read support for Elasticsearch, the open source search and analytics engine, including filters for advanced search

Automatic “push” of updated resources from the server to the clients using the brand new Mercure protocol

Integration with the Symfony Messenger component to easily implement the CQRS pattern and to handle messages asynchronously (using brokers such as RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka, Amazon SQS or Google PubSub)

With 114 commits and 234 files changed over almost 3 years. This is one of the biggest contributions to the project.

The MongoDB integration relies on Doctrine MongoDB ODM 2.0 (currently in beta). To enable this feature, just install and configure DoctrineMongoDBBundle. API Platform will autodetect it. Then, create a class mapped with MongoDB, and mark it as an API resource:

The support for MongoDB leverages the flexibility of API Platform: it has been implemented as a data provider and a data persister. Relations, pagination as well as boolean, date, numeric, order, range and search filters are also supported!

A big thanks to all contributors of this amazing feature, and to Andreas Braun, the maintainer of Doctrine MongoDB ODM, for the in-depth reviews!

Elasticsearch support

Elasticsearch is another very popular open-source data store. It allows to perform full-text searches and advanced analyzes on very large datasets. Orange has sponsored the development of an Elasticsearch data provider for API Platform, as well as some interesting search filters. The implementation has been realized by Baptiste Meyer (API Platform Core Team). Thanks to Orange, this feature is now available for everybody in API Platform 2.4.

To enable and configure the Elasticsearch support, refer to the official documentation. Then, a simple resource class corresponding to an Elasticsearch index is enough to benefit from the full power of API Platform:

Then, you can use an URL such as /tweets?message=foo to search using Elasticsearch.

Keep in mind that it’s your responsibility to populate your Elastic index. To do so, you can use Logstash, a custom data persister or any other mechanism that fits for your project (such as an ETL).

Baptiste also took this opportunity to improve the code handling the pagination. It is now a generic class used by all native data providers (Doctrine ORM, MongoDB and Elasticsearch), that you can reuse in your own.

Real time update of client with Mercure

Mercure is a brand new protocol built on top of HTTP/2 and Server-sent Events (SSE). It’s a modern and high-level alternative to WebSocket (WebSocket is not compatible with HTTP/2). Mercure is especially useful to publish updates of resources served through web APIs in real time. It is natively supported by modern browsers (no required library nor SDK) and is very useful to update reactive web and mobile apps.

In version 2.4, I added Mercure support to the server component of API Platform and to the React and React Native app generators. The Docker Compose setup provided with API Platform has also been updated to provide a Mercure hub.

Configuring the framework to automatically dispatch updates to the currently connected clients is straightforward:

CQRS and async message handling with Symfony Messenger

Messenger is a new Symfony component created by Samuel Roze (Symfony and API Platform Core Team). It allows to dispatch messages using message queues (RabbitMQ, Kafka, Amazon SQS, Google PubSub…) and to handle them asynchronously. It provides a message bus that is very useful to implement the CQRS design pattern.

In API Platform 2.4, I added a convenient way to leverage the capabilities of Messenger. This new feature is particularly useful to create service-oriented (RPC-like) endpoints:

Server Push

HTTP/2 allows a server to pre-emptively send (or “push”) responses (along with corresponding “promised” requests) to a client in association with a previous client-initiated request. This can be useful when the server knows the client will need to have those responses available in order to fully process the response to the original request.

The UI is built client-side dynamically by parsing the API spec. Awesome isn’t it?

Jean-François also added some convenient helpers to help customizing the admin, and Laury Sorriaux fixed a long standing limitation: it’s now possible to use the admin even with API not served at the root of the domain (such as /api).

Hello All ,
By any chance will anyone have a complete api-patform docker config file with mysql instead of postgres.
To be honest, I’ve done my best to re-configure it with the version 2.4.2 it’s a nightmare !!
bunch of error cropping up and just few containers not running.
Any hint/suggestions/ideas would be much appreciated.